"I'm at the vets" she sobbed. At which point I realised something wasn't as it should be. It was a Monday morning and at 9.45 she should have been at work. Now I consider myself to be a fairly stable person when events start to get tough, but on this occasion I panicked. Albeit momentarily. I spotted both my muts under my desk.

My panic gave way to complete bewilderment and I thought I should ask

"Prey tell me dear what are you doing there?"

She sniffled and sobbed and blabbed down the phone and I couldn't understand word of it. I calmed her down and managed to extract some information from her. It was a little like pulling teeth.

As she was walking into work she spotted a dog in some distress walking towards her. It's front paw was raised and it looked a little dishevelled. She managed to take hold of it and promptly walked into her work with it. Now when you realise she's a Librarian and she works in a public library - well you get the picture. She took the dog off to or local vets.

That evening we paid a visit to see her at the vets. Her front paw was lifeless. She was 4/10th lame in one of her rear legs and during the day the vert had removed some old chicken bones from the roof of her mouth. The vet did say he had tried to relocate her front leg but was unable to. He felt the dog was nursing an old injury which was preventing relocation. He said it looked like amputation was the only way forward.

The dog was still very poorly. We were told she was about three days away from dying from pure lack of weight. Naturally we had informed the police in case anyone had reported the dog as missing. The law required us to wait for week before we could offer to home the dog temporarily. Which we did.

We soon realised she was quite an affectionate lady and we decided to put an advert in the paper to see if someone was looking for her. I received a call from a chap who claimed to be the dogs owner, which made me feel quite happy. So I began chatting to this chap on the phone. I asked him when he had lost his dog. When he replied Monday (being the same Monday my good lady found the dog) I began to get a little concerned. I asked a few questions about the dogs front leg and he said it had been like that for some time.

I decided not to allow the owner to collect the dog and informed him I was going to contact the RSPCA and ask them to get involved. He told me I had no right and demanded my address so he could collect his dog. I suggested I would take the dog to the local police station where he could collect it - sadly he declined my generous offer.

When the RSPCA inspector came down we had a good chat. The inspector told me that he would speak with the owner and added he didn't feel there would be much he could do to bring a case against them. Which did make me cross [well a little anwyays]. I recall telling him I had spoken to the police and they were more than happy to bring a case against the owner for cruelty.

The RSPCA inspector visited the owner. It turned out that the family had a daughter who lived with them, who was un-married. She had a child and when the child was born the dog was simply put outside. Day and night with no shelter. The inspector was told the dog had injured it's leg when it fell off a wall. It was at this point that the inspector suggested to the couple that if they took the dog back he would want them to arrange for the dogs health to be improved and for it to have shelter and possibly surgery for its front leg.

They didn't have the money to do all this.

So my good lady offered to adopt the dog. We did work closely with a specialist vet to see if her leg could be saved. It was not to be. So she had her front leg removed. Not long after she had an emergency operation to remove her womb which had a very serious infection in it.

We spent about £2K on vets bills. Which at the time was a great hardship to us. We called her Poppy and she lived with us for another five years until she passed away in November 2010. She had some happy times playing with our other two muts, which were both adopted from the local dog sanctuary.

So you can imagine this dog - which resembled a whippet, with one leg at her front and 4/10ths lame in her rear, hopping and limping everywhere it went. When it played with the other dogs and ran it could never work out it's right front leg was not there and when it turned it just went all over the place.

I cannot imagine why people treat animals this way. I put it down to a lack of understanding.

Two weeks ago we visited the RSPCA again. We took our new kitten home which we had adopted. She's called Mitsey.

Well actually we called her Mitsey Tiddles because we felt her name would help raise the profile of our beleaguered post code. We now have two dogs, one kitten and two guinea pigs. Which I think for one little five year old girl is enough.

Responce to Nuttymut 's story,
wow what a touching story, it relieves me to know how kind some people are in this world when there are others who are so unkind, ur story moved me deeply and i just had to shed a few tears for Poppy. & please give Mitsey love of hugs from me as she has such a lucky home :)